


Oasis

by Yeti1409



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 08:51:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21241436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeti1409/pseuds/Yeti1409
Summary: I played the Oasis quest like a year or more ago, and I felt really bad when I decided to ignore Harold's wish to die, but then he actually apologized to *me* for complaining. I didn't like that at all; it completely took away the grey morality of the situation, so I wrote this to satisfy my desire for the game to guilt-trip me. First thing I've written other than texts or essays in years, so don't expect poetry. I included a quick summary of the quest in a note at the beginning.





	Oasis

**Author's Note:**

> Quick sum up of the quest: the Lone Wanderer finds an area with lush, green plants and finds out that the source of it is a man named Harold who has been stuck as a tree because it grew over him long ago. He asks you to kill him, and another lady gives you a liniment and tells you that it can spread the growth across the wasteland. There’s some other people too but they’re irrelevant to this. The LW goes down into the caves to take action upon the heart.

The Lone Wanderer stood by the heart of the tree, the man. In their left hand, they held the liniment to spread green across the barren wasteland that was once the heart of a lost civilization. They had seen people starving, dying of thirst. But they had also seen Harold, his empty spirit, long since decayed where his tree form had not. You can spout all the ethical theories you want to about right and wrong, but when it comes down to it, theories rarely prepare you for the real thing. Help those who cannot help themselves, their father always told them. But what do you do when helping one harms another? And when there’s no heroes or villains, only victims and some kid from a vault just stumbling into this mess with a gun and an herbal rub.

The flamethrower on their back felt heavy. Would they ever sacrifice themselves to a near-eternal purgatory as a tree? Just so some people they’d never met might one day have some plants?

And then their thoughts flickered back to that old man outside of Megaton begging for one sip of clean water. The dirt on everyone’s faces they passed from the loose dirt forever flying in every crevice. The scavenging for any sort of mediocre food. The heat that beat on them as they walked miles and miles across the barren earth, and the heavenly shade gifted by the Oasis.

How many people here have seen a tree? Not those shriveled black things. I’m talking real trees. Brown bark, green leaves, photosynthesis, all that good stuff.  
The Lone Wanderer sighed and slowly began to spread the liniment on the heart.

They returned to the grove, looking at the soft, green ground with solemnity. The others spoke to them, and they patiently listened and took the gifts they gave them with gratitude, but their mind was on the one they betrayed. As Harold saw them approach, he said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” was all they could manage to say to him. He paused.

“I suppose I never really had a choice in the end, did I?”

They looked up. Though Harold didn’t really have the ability to make facial expressions, it seemed like he was somehow more sorrowful than before. They had expected anger, prepared for it, but this...this felt like a knife was melting into their chest.

“It was for a good cause,” they mumbled out.

He said nothing. And he said enough.

The Lone Wanderer began to leave the Oasis, trying to focus on their father, on their friends, on anything but Harold. When they got to the nearest trader, they sold away all the gifts the people of Oasis had given them. They wanted no reminder.


End file.
